Bugwards compatible is a property of a system, product, process or technology that assures that older bugs are retained and not fixed since the quirk of the bug is used to gain features originally not intended.
Fixing such a bug would break the systems, products, processes or technologies depending on or using it. This would cause substantial cost for the consumers when compensating for the loss of features.

In a couple of years I have had the opportunity to live through the full cycle of going from centralized to a decentralized organization. Or rather I’m in the middle of moving in to a decentralized organisation. But as so often the pendular tends to swing a bit to far when performing these type of changes. In both cases one of most challenging tasks are to manage complexity.

Ashby’s Law concerns the relationship of a control system to the system it attempts to control. One version of Ashby’s Law is in the box at right. Ashby’s Law tells us that a complex system requires a complex controlling device. Conversely, simple systems require only simple controllers for successful operation.

So from my experience moving towards a centralization you try to improve efficiency by similarity in processes and better utilization of expertise. Decentralization is about speed and productivity of the team. So dependent on which business you belong to and the risk your business is affected by disruptive technologies you focus on the one or the other.
If you are a leader in your area, you can not sit back and watch, you need to constantly move so here the decentralization is probably the better option.

Back to complexity. Both central and de-central approach introduces complexity but on different levels. Production units tend to benefit from decentralization when it comes to complexity, the autonomy decentralization brings with it makes decision making faster. But looking higher up in the organization handling and controlling the whole organization becomes much more complex. Still if you are a leader in your field this is the only way to continue to lead. This is more like herding cats.
Decentralized it’s the other way around managing the organisation becomes easier but to the cost of speed.

This is something Yves Morieux describes very well in this video. He tears appart the classical business school dogma to create middle offices to handle complexity. This is the wrong way to do it since it only increases the complexity even more. I also like his focus on the manager role. I especially like his description of the manger role.

The role of a manager is make people do what they would not spontaneously do!

My favorite Professor Dr. Peter Kruse goes even deeper into the field of how to manage complexity. His take on complexity is based on his combined experience in psychology and brain research and later becoming a manager for a company. He quickly identified that structure an behavior in a company were similar to the human brain. I hope that I with time will manage to write a bit more about him. For german speaking audience this 45min video is a very good starting point. One his main point is that management need to adopt to changes in the society to be able to keep up. Planning everything is a thing of the past. The increasing democratization of information, the exponential increase of complexity and the dismantlement of hierarchies needs a new type of management which utilizes the collective intelligence.

So my conclusion is if you want to lead, it is important to focus on reducing the complexity for the team bringing direct value to your customers and as manager nourish and take care of the collective intelligence.

I have collected a series of videos touching upon this theme on my Youtube channel.

I think we can all agree upon that the world is turning faster and faster which means that the planning society from the 90’s is no more relevant then the planning economy from the dark ages of communism. To create a five year plan in the past is equally off as creating a 12 month plan today. Hence the capitalist of yesterday are the communists of today!

New technology arise faster than ever, take WhatsApp for instance which more or less instantly stoped the SMS growth. To react fast on such changes a long term plan is not the solution, the solution is to be more agile when planning.

That means that we today should look more into iterated processes when planning. By taking small steps we can more easily adapt to new themes that get a big response in the community.

Personally I feel that I’m involved in less micro conflicts than many of the people around me.
I think I have an answer to that.
My focus is on what people are saying and not how!
Personally I believe that if we all could stop focusing on how and try to understand what people are saying, we would have less conflicts.
To reduce the personal impact on how things are told I believe it’s necessary to understand how to communicate with less violence and above all become more prestigeless.

Bought a unlocked ZTE MF93D to take with me on our vacation. Selected this over the Huawei E5776 since it was available at a local store to very good price.

Have been reeding a lot compering the two and in the end my conclusion was that there are no big difference between them. ZTE you can use MiMo (dual external antenna) in low signal condition but the HUWEI has a bit better internal antenna and max throughput on 4G. But what difference does 150 Mbps for Huawei and 100Mbps for the ZTE really do when you do not intend to stream multiple movies over 4G.

Have been trying to get the dlna to work, but to get the movies to show up in the Video folder has not been easy. Google didn’t have the answer.

No manual saying what limitation there are and support could not help directly, they needed to escalate it.

So after some testing I found that the following works:

.mp4

.wmv

Did not work:

.m4v

.avi

.mkv

.mov

.divx

.xvid

So now I have to turn on the converter at home, so that my kids can stream movies on our iPads when we drive the 2000km down to Munich.

In Germany I buy prepaid surf card for the ZTE router and we can all surf without using expensive roaming. With some extra battery pack we can be on the move the whole day.